Is Your Marketing Know How A Pile Of Crap ?

"Almost Everything They Teach You In Marketing 101 Is A Big Pile Of Crap!"  

Dear Marketing Professional,

If you buy the typical book about advertising... if you take advice from the average sales manager or ad agency... if you do sales and marketing the same way most big companies do... you will be thoroughly and totally equipped to do business in 1985 - (Just in case that year ever comes back.) .

But today , those same methods will get you slaughtered. Or, even if it's not a total disaster, you'll constantly be saying to yourself, "I can't believe how dang hard it is to make money these days!"

So I've written a 9-day email mini-course called "The 9 Great-Lies of Sales &  Marketing." In this course, I take some of the most beloved "sacred cows" in sales and marketing--and grind them into hamburger. If you're easily offended, don't bother signing up.

Is this free course worth your time? As I write this, out of 3,094 people who have taken the course, only 122 have unsubscribed. So 97% think it's pretty good.

Crap ?

The WORKING Monkeys[Retire?]

"He is my hands," explains Haji Endut."Maybe I need him more than he needs me".These pig tailed macaques - called 'beruk' in the local dialect - have an almost theatrical relationship with their masters - involving acrobatics,danger and drama in their 'training'."I give my monkeys affection every day.I sit with them , we groom one another.We share fruit or walk to the river together to bathe" Haji Endut adds .These macaques have become the backbone of harvesting millions of coconuts each year across a belt of land stretching from the east coast of Malaysia across to the Sulu Isles.They can work almost anytime.On a good day a macaque can harvest up to 600 coconuts working 5 to 6 hours at a stretch.They tear through the tops of 30 to 40 foot palms throwing down coconuts like rain in a monsoon.These monkeys are captured whilst very young even as early as in their nursing days and 'apprenticed' to their masters , who build with their charges a bond of companionship and partnering , not pets , that holds out throughout their lives.They ( the macaques ) often face considerable risk as they scramble up the palms and the thatch at the top often hosts ants , bees , scorpions and even snakes.
 [  Photo : RD ]

The biggest mistake people make in life is not  making a living at doing what they most enjoy.  - Malcolm S. Forbes (1919-1990)
Building  Your  Own

Just What Is Success

I must be about 11 years old when this bouncy history teacher of mine hands me a book entitled " The Seven Laws Of Success".It's contents became the shoes for my small feet . I learnt there is a Great Designer , that you get where you will by setting goals in life : push on over , around and below obstacles , be a beaver and have unflailing enthusiasm . Sex is no play matter and it takes character to build relationships and keep friends beyond today. I steered away from whatever would drag me into what I felt were back alleys and stayed on the highways . Money can't buy values and character.Later when I became a schoolteacher and my students were teenagers I was aggrieved by the seeming inadequacy of them and others in making decisions and taking a stand in the face of situations , conflicts and choices .

To quote Winston Churchill , Britain's wartime prime minister "Come on now all you young people all over the world , twenty to twenty five , those are the years,don't be content with things as they are,enter upon your inheritance , accept your responsibilities . Raise the glorious flags again. Don't take no for an answer. NEVER SUBMIT TO FAILURE !"

Go out there and celebrate: whatever , sing , serve , dance , cheer up the girls ( or the boys ) be caring and give , do anything but beware the cheating alleys and backstreets.I wouldn't know what I would be today but for that road hardly travelled , the lighthouse that that book was - it's still with me badgered , frayed , paged and aged but hey it'll stay a friend .

The 7 Laws Of Success

The Spirit Of Men

The curiosity to go forth , to seek the unchartered , to explore the wildest reaches of the earth or the Milky Way , the train tunnels below Park Avenue or setting up a little school for a little tribe in a corner of the earth keeps individuality's flames leaping high above the existers.

In January 1915 , Sir Ernest Shackleton with 28 men on board Endurance on it's way to Antartica became hopelessly locked in ice.When the ice broke ten months later , Endurance sank leaving the crew homeless and adrift on a sea of ice . After five months drifting on ice floes the crew took to lifeboats for a dangerous journey to desolate Elephant Island.Reaching it , Shackleton went on with one lifeboat and five of his best men hundreds of kilometres across bone chilling Scotia Sea to South Georgia completing one of history's greatest open boat journeys. He and two of his fittest men then traversed the island's glacial mountains , a feat as yet unrivalled.

Stay Home, Make Money!

Be your own boss!

Starting a business from home is the silk route way to get your feet wet in entrepreneurial waters without sawing your arms off paying for overheads , physical office space , staffing , media tools and inventories ! 

Businesses are being launched every other day from off  bar tables , bedrooms , attics, golf buggies , battlefield trenches and yes,off  kitchen tables .Thanks to the 'Net and all the resources available at your fingertips it is easy to start a business right in your bathroom!

You can unleash , turn loose your curiosity and find inspiration building your own hand wrought small business .It's recession proof ,cheers you on and requires NO start up fund to launch off. It answers to no boss but your hunches,intuitions and nose.

More and more people are dropping out of the rat race to provide services or goods from home.Start part-time and build until you can say goodbye to your day job. 

But this area is fraught with "get rich quick" schemes. So evaluate the opportunities carefully. Anything that offers great rewards for no-or-low work or free income is snake oil.

Joy Of Freedom..

Amy's Story : Amy had always wanted to own a gift shop, but it wasn't feasible due to her husband's career, which creates frequent relocations. She thought that she had found the answer with eBay, but that all changed... literally overnight. eBay had shut-down her business on a false accusation with no questions asked.This frustrating "eye-opener" underlined for Amy the importance of self-reliance, owning your own traffic and income diversification. SBI! provides Amy with all three, plus a way to share her passion about beautiful beaches!

"... eBay sends me traffic and when I send them traffic they pay me as an affiliate for doing it. To say the least, my business has grown and prospered since I stopped working for eBay and started using SBI! to grow something that is truly mine."

Even With All The Mistakes, My Future Is Clear ...

I just wanted to post about my happiness and excitement as my loving-it-raw.com site starts to snowball!

I started my site in 2009 and made LOTS of mistakes early on. I'm quite embarrassed at how awful it used to look! Nevertheless by taking a lot of hits and quite a few misses, I was still steadily building traffic.

When I started I didn't have any kind of business plan, I had no idea HOW I was going to make money or what kind of site I wanted to even have, I just had a vague idea of, well I'll start a blog about what I eat and people will read it and I'll make a lot of money... Thankfully, I was steered towards SBI by Steve Pavlina's fabulous review, so instead of starting a blog that no one would read, I instead started an SBI site.

I was quite sketchy about following directions in the Action Guide, I would often go ahead and do something and then read the action guide later, figuring out that I'd done it all wrong! So growth was probably a lot slower than it could have been. I would also get a burst of enthusiasm and work for a little while, then get deflated because I wasn't seeing the immediate results and then procrastinate and do nothing for months at a time!

My Monetization Strategy....

Ask Yourself These 3 Questions About Traffic To Your Site

1. Do you wish your best prospects search on the keyword you’ve bid on or KNOW they’ll see your ad on a website they likely visit regularly?

2. Do you spend most of YOUR time online searching on Google? Browsing websites? Why would you expect your prospects to be any different?

3. Would you rather fight it out with hundreds of other keyword bidders…or with just a handful…or NONE? ( Seriously, there are places in the content network – one of them that gets millions of visitors per day – where most of the time, there are ZERO advertisers )

Tapping the Traffic from the Internet’s Top Sites

The Best Thing You Can Do About That 'Venture Fund'

What would you need to do to start building your own ' venture capital' out of the ordinary ways everyone or almost everyone does ?

Remember your old age funds? They could be halved off  in purchasing power by the time they come to greet you! 

And if you think your day job is going to do it - just go out into the streets and greet your fellow stragglers and plodders and whiners.

So how do you get to build this fund ? It all boils down to what you decide to do next in your life.

Every new day is a fresh lease of time for another race day, the olympics of your life . Whether you're going to snuggle up before the fireplace , watch 'em movies or ..or go out and be a wolf for your causes is your present moment decision.

Standing still - you'll only fall off the bicycle or just become floatsam.

The best thing you can do is BEING yourself . What can you teach or show the way to ? What would you burn for ? What makes you tick ? Are you going to work for your life or let life work for you ?

Do What Successful People Have Done 

Go After Your Goals Like A Shark Would!

Sharks can only swim forward.
They don't know the other way. 
They never stop moving .
Some scientists say they are fast moving missiles.

They don't allow themselves to be caught off guard.
They have a honed  tool bag to hunt and kill, from the way they push themselves silently  through water to their legendary senses of smell and hearing and not excepting those glistening walls of teeth.

Now think of your life - how often have you set goals as you swam thru' the seas of life only to have forgotten all of them a few days later ? How often have you allowed goals to get out of sight ?
Have you gone out after your dreams like a shark WOULD ?
It's time to turn shark [ for the good things , i.e.].

Like A Shark Would..

From Local To Global...

Does Your Yellow Pages Or Newspaper Ad .......
1. pull in hundreds of visitors, many of whom ready buyers, every day ?  2.’talk’ to , convince them to your product’s quality before they call you?   3. grow , shape  customer relationships that you will be needing  to step up the gas on      loyalty and  repeat orders?  4. hold the reader’s eyeballs or does it’s prescence fade away in the face of all those      other ads on the same page ?  5. get off the beaten trails to help monetize your skills , know how , knowledge and      experience?   6. offer you an avenue to stay in touch with your clients or give them some seasonal      special, a discount coupon or other value adding tips ?  7. allow you to seed markets without a physical prescence [ and huge costs] elsewhere ?  8. enable you to leap from , liberate you from  an old world  business entity into a digital        merchantship that’s reshaping commerce?      It maybe time to own your business  instead of it owning you. "I was able to reach the global market 24X7, rather than just the local market for my paving company that I was used to reaching in the past. I had left the manual-labor era and had become a digital worker ... a knowledge worker who can reach the globe by using his brain." Judd  Burdon

The Singlemost Important Quality To Success..

His mother was a domestic.The family lived in almost a cabin without electricity and plumbing just a hundred yards outside of a golf course separated by a fence.Gazing across [the fence] the seventh grader wondered as he watched golfers on the seventh fairway if he could ever make it out into under those lights of the club. He found an old club and began to practice hitting balls around his yard first.Quitting school he managed to get a job as a gardener at the club and on the side worked as a caddy.He went on to hone his skills without an instructor.The years in between weren't kind but he stayed in the game. He pressed on. In 1966 he was 54th in the U.S. Open and at that point wondered if golf was for him.In 1968 Lee Trevino won the U.S.Open and the British Open followed in 1980.

Talent and enthusiasm , though important , aren't enough.What we all can do with in our lives like it had been for others before us is : perseverance , pressing on.Here are other voices on pressing on:

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Franklin D. Roosevelt 

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.    Harriet Beecher Stowe

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

Margaret Mead 

  
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”   
Calvin Coolidge. 

Cut Through The Doubt And Noise

Teen Jobs

When you think of summer and teenagers : beach times, ice cream , all night parties , car cruises and those never ending  cell phone chats plonk into mind and... work? Yes, what about work ? The current  economic crisis has exacerbated the availability of employment opportunities  for youth in the labour market. A huge percentage of the young , particularly young women across the world are unable to find employment in the marketplace.The job market for teens today is further challenged because they'll have to  jockey against a much older, more experienced throng of job hunters not excluding immigrants as well.Youth population growth meanwhile continues to outpace job and economic growth .

To add to the woe there's a lot of employer angst as well in the marketplace when it comes to hiring teen workers : headaches , accommodations , faltering attendance rates , restrictions , lack of experience, and other liabilities.
 
And there's a worse scenario . A prolonged period of unemployment can cause young people to quit on job searches or be content to work willingly under unhappy conditions, incurring eventually, costs to the economy, to society and to their families. A lack of decent work, if  faced  from an early age, threatens to crush that teen's future employment prospects and may lead to unsuitable work behaviour patterns that can stretch into their lifetimes.
 
Although teen job seekers face being  roughed up by recession, these downturns  have driven home again the value of work. Maybe the best money to be made is in taking up on odd jobs. But there's another  frontier. It might be worth taking that small step.

The SMALL STEP...

Beware - Work Stress As Contagious As A Cold, Says Study

Do you sit next to a whingeing workmate who constantly moans about fellow colleagues, workload or politics? 

Professor Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii, discovered that stress can be as contagious as a cold, and that 'passive' or second-hand stress and anxiety can quickly spread around the workplace.

'People seem to be capable of mimicking others' facial, vocal, and postural expressions with stunning rapidity,' Hatfield said.'As a consequence, they are able to feel themselves into those other emotional lives to a surprising extent.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2058988/Beware-workplace-whinger-Passive-stress-contagious-cold-study-reveals.html#ixzz24BeVDDSD

The end of family life?

Almost every teacher, who looks into the eyes of his/her students can't help but be perplexed or sit in grief.Woe, worry, fears and aimlessness glisten out of many of those eyes. I have every now and then shed a tear when news arrived of another brawl between some twos' or threes' or that another teenager has been left pregnant. More disparaging news just keeps populating small talk,table talk and hallway conversations.I wonder what their adult lives will be.I can see reflected in those eyes, fears that shouldn't be their lot for their times and age. Whatever happened to happy,fearless childhood?Many can't tell 'right' from 'wrong'. Nor do they seem to know what sex is for! This issue/question boils down to human worth , talent and the purpose of life itself.These kids are the next generation of leaders who'll flood public life and offices.Just why this character blighting? How has this come about and why is it dragging everyone down in it's wake ? I think the real reason's : family life . Family life as it should be has broken down .Family units have  become dysfunctional and worse days lie ahead for it. Children who are moorless come up with their own manifestos just as parents did not too long ago and continue to.The historian , Edward Gibbons was right.He attributes the fall of the mighty Roman Empire to:


1. “The rapid increase of divorce; the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society.”

2.  “Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies for free bread and circuses for the populace.”

3. “The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal.”

4. “The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy was within, the decadence of the people.”

5. “The decay of religion–faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life and becoming impotent to warn and guide the people.”
 
 Read more at :
http://www.redstate.com/wbf/2011/11/08/edward-gibbon-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-and-the-hymn-of-the-welfare-state/

Teen Fears..

One of the biggest fears teenagers are afraid of today is that they may not be financially secure, maybe even not make it into the haves.That coupled with all the bad news coming off presses doesn't help.But unless one prepares for the future , that 'future' however it comes,wherever it comes from will bear down upon you and may even crush you in it's wake.It would be better if you confront the situation should it come a'knocking.

Get back into the FAMILY history.Did anybody in the family line , either Mom's or Dad's excel  at any enterprise ? Do you have an idea that you want to take into the market place ? Have you been seen talking to entrepreneurs or business owners about starting up? Can you do some homework? You owe it to yourself because what you do is what's going to make or break your life .

Should you hold a job ? Is a job safe ? Is a job all the security in the world ? Here's something to ponder :Here's Steve Pavlina's OPINION on that.

Or how about thinking differently ? Why not learn up on the basics of starting a business ?
Here's a suggestion , a lead :

Flipping Burgers?Why Not Make More Money And Develop A Resumé-Buffing Skillset?

Individual OR Conformist

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim Morrison

tags: freedom , individuality , inspirational , mask , personality , revolution , truth

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“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: individuality

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“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
― Judy Garland

tags: be-yourself , greatness , individuality

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Credit : Credit :   http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show_tag?id=individuality

Start A Wild Ride....

Have you ever looked into the heavens and asked a hundred questions ?Why were we born wherever we are ? What is life ? What's behind of life when we vanish into death ? By the time we are done fumbling , fuming , wringing for the answers , well , we are grown up .But the chapters to our lives are just about to roll out.Very soon we get out of college and dive into the marketplace.Another chapter to the story of our lives begs for a title : what are we going to or should do with the rest of our lives ?
So we dig  into the marketplace and  carom ourselves  around , building careers. Carving , paving paths that 'everybody' does - the safe , the comfortable , the common and keeping  to the gemutlichkeit of our commune. Hoping that our dreams will bring the rains.

But sadly,quite like it had been for our old people , after majoring in wrong turns here and there , we scramble back again under the same skies , back onto the same spot on the beach  seeking  both solace and answers to another question : Will I be a person of substance ever ?
All of our efforts haven't behaved.Those cherished dreams have fled from memory , forgotten like the forms of last week's clouds.
Yet can we hang our life out to dry ?
No!
Go throw yourself into another mellee!
It's time to do some exciting things in life.
Keep being in the habit of taking risks - small , perhaps- now and then.

Start something...

A Way to Plug Your Money Leaks

 Life is many things - getting married , starting a family, moving to a new job and yes , heartaches : family squabbles , a divorce , rip offs by close friends. But whatever it is , if you aren't prepared ,you're gonna be beaten,really beaten down.
One of the ways you can stay on top in life is to be prepared for all the financial changes that come with these events.These are milestones that will determine where your life is going to be headed to unless you correct directions or hue back to your road map. Here's a nudge that'll crop the anxieties that herd into your heart during the messy days in our lives.

A Financial  Roadmap

Don't Let Life Happen ........

Poverty is a terrible reality today around the world.One place where this problem is both constant and dire is in inner cities /ghettoes across the world.With the mellee some economies are in , it wouldn't be surprising if more people get drowned or stumble into poverty . Early pregnancies , teen violence , drug dependence , homelessness  -  the litany of common bad that these groups of people are up against literally sears the conscience.
But there's another side to all this: that each one of us DOES have complete control over our lives. You are free to be whatever you wish to be provided you work hard enough for it , that there is a price for the prize.Don't let life happen to you . You can beat the odds and come out on top.Although many careers are predicated on education and funding , here's one opportunity that requires BOLDNESS and it costs you nothing literally.

Don't 'TRY', Just DO IT!